When you picture a contract in your mind’s eye, you probably imagine a two things: paper and words. Specifically, a lot of paper, and a lot of words. However, with the digitization of the contract, hard copies of these documents are much more rare, and in the future, dense blocks of words may be sharing more space with images, charts, illustrations, infographics, and visualizations.

Contrary to what might first appear to be the case, long, dense contracts filled with legalese are not necessarily more thorough and do not necessarily do a better job at offering legal protection than shorter, plainer contracts. In fact, long and unwieldy contracts are often harder to navigate, harder to understand, harder to control, and possibly, harder to defend in the courtroom.

Contracts have a well-known reputation for being dense, technical, and even completely incomprehensible–and historically, people expect contracts to be baffling fine print that can only be interpreted by attorneys.